It’s strange to me that this guy keeps popping up when he’s had maybe one actually successful book (_The Burnout Society_) in twenty years. I’ve read _The Disappearance of Rituals_ and _Shanzai_ and found them both “shallow, smoothed and filtered.” There’s not a lot of secondary literature building on his work, just another book of his popped out every couple years.

> If I’ve learnt anything from Han it’s that we don’t need perfection, smooth lines and filters, to feel complete. We need the authenticity that comes from the negative, the imperfect, the hidden and the simply beautiful. Instead of falling in love with ourselves, we should be falling in love with others and the world, not to see ourselves in them, not to commodify them, not to achieve friendship or marriage or love, but to appreciate what makes them different and other.

This is a perplexing turn to me because _The Disappearance of Rituals_ is, in large part, about how authenticity is The Problem With Society and we’ve all lost our ability to submerge our individuality in ritual-bound communities, each one homogenous in some respect (the ritual itself, at least).